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Monday, January 28, 2013

Preaching to Unbelief

That’s a great question for church
planters. We’re supposed to be connecting with unbelievers. It’s also a great
question for anyone who presents Christian faith in the pulpit (and who wishes
to be relevant to our post-Christian culture).

Here are a few of the answers that were
given:

·Who put you in charge of preaching to
unbelievers so that they can believe the same things that you do?

·You can't force people to believe what
you want them to believe. We each have our own journey to make to God.

·You don't. My Christian friends don't
try and I respect the hell out of them for it. And if they started, I'd laugh
at them.

·You must be using the term
"friend" very loosely if they mean no more than potential recruits to
you.

And
here was the answer chosen by voters as the best:

·Learn to
accept those who do not think as you do and leave them alone. Love them for who
they are instead of who you want them to be.

Each of these answers reflects what Tim
Keller refers to as the implausibility structure of American culture towards
Christianity. Ideas such as pluralism, individual freedom, tolerance, and the
relativity of truth form a matrix that works against belief in a God who defines
reality and the exclusive, specific claims of Jesus to be Lord of every person.
Against this implausibility matrix belief in the Christian God and Jesus as
Lord simply does not make sense. Christianity becomes a dead option.

In traditional preaching, based on a
modernist, Christendom perspective. We assumed that we and our hearers shared
the same truth construct. What we needed to establish was a shared means for
knowing that truth, whether by scientific enquiry or receiving divine
communication.

In our post-modern, post-Christian context
where the very idea of absolute, meta-truth is rejected we cannot assume a
shared truth construct. Now the only substantive means to establish connection
is by working on the same questions.

For those of us who have had courses on
preaching we are no longer able to begin with propositions, statements of
truth, which we explain, illustrate, and apply for our hearers. Now we must dig
deeper, into the questions of unbelief that we will explore together,
considering options, one of which we believe is God. If we don't, we indeed become square pegs desperately seeking to connect into round holes.